Comments

I am hearing that the Wordpress Gutenberg update may greatly affect Visual Composer and I guess in our case WPBakery, which is tied into the Polytechnic theme.

Do you have any suggestions as to how to handle Gutenberg? Will we need to disable WP Bakery, is that even possible with this theme? Or in preparation, do you think we should stop using WP elements like accordion, hover image, etc.

Gutenberg is currently available as a plugin (and is still in development)

Wordpress 5.0 (Gutenberg) still has a TBD release date

WPBakery Page Builder (Visual Composer) will be testing it's compatibility with the new change(s) coming

Depending on how the two page builders work together, this may or may not affect all themes that leverage VC as a page builder (including Polytechnic).

VC is not technically needed for Polytechnic to run, the core functionality of the theme can run without it (and users can use the native WP page builder if they choose) but many of the page layouts advertised in the demo are built with VC.

In answer to your questions, if VC modules are affected, then finding alternates to those is not a bad idea - but we do not yet know the impact, and I seriously doubt VC will go down quietly (as the #1 selling page builder in the WP community). Based on their blog, the current build of G works with their plugin "easy peasy." (https://blog.visualcomposer.io/gutenberg-editor-explained/).

Long story short, ultimately this will be on VC to work out and I trust them to continue to offer a fully compatible plugin moving forward based on past experience. Theme authors may need to make minor updates, but these will be guided by VC to ensure compatibility.